Everything You’ve Been Told About “Following Your Passion” is Wrong |🔥 A millennial’s hot take on career change advice for doctors

Do you feel confused or triggered by the word passion? Either you desperately wish you had a passion to follow…. but keep coming up short.

OR

You do have something you are passionate about- but feel like it’s not realistic to follow that.

For millennial doctors experiencing burnout or questioning their career path, there is so much confusing and contradictory advice around the concept of passion.

So let’s clear that up right now.

In this episode you’ll learn:

1. 9 ways the concept of “passion” is misunderstood and the nuances around this topic that will help you find a fulfilling career path.
2. Why the advice “don’t follow your passion”… is detrimental (especially for doctors)
3. How to think about passion in a more accessible and practical way- even if you don’t have anything that you care about right now.

If you want to find a fulfilling and meaningful career- you need to understand these nuances around passion.

Hit play now to clear this up.

Life After Medicine explores doctors' journey of finding purpose beyond their medical careers, addressing physician burnout, career changes, opportunities in non-clinical jobs for physicians and remote jobs within the healthcare system without being burned out, using medical training.

Transcript

0:00

In this episode, you'll learn why following our passion is a must. If we want to live fulfilling and purposeful lives

Speaker: 0:07

Welcome to Life After Medicine, the podcast helping millennial health professionals find their purpose and turn it into their paycheck. Because you were meant for more than 15 minute patient visits under fluorescent lights. I'm your host Chelsea Tarjan, a residency dropout turned six figure entrepreneur and world traveler. Together we'll explore how you can make a difference without sacrificing your health and happiness.

0:31

Okay, so recently I have been seeing the YouTube videos from Ali Abdaal, and he's been like interviewing and quoting Cal Newport, and he's taking on this anti passion stance, both of them are. And I completely just disagree with this anti passion stance, this advice of don't follow your passion. I will admit that passion is a very nuanced topic. So I want to bring the nuance into this podcast, I think we absolutely must follow our passions. But the term passion and the whole concept around passion is just misunderstood. First, let me just go into what some of their arguments are that Cal Newport, Ali Abdaal, the anti passion people. Here's one of Cal Newport's arguments.. He said, the first reason is that most people don't have a clear predefined passion to follow. This is especially true if you consider young people who are just setting out on their own for the first time. The advice to follow your passion is frustratingly meaningless. Like many people, you don't have a passion to follow. This is something I've seen in. A Facebook group. There was recently a post from someone who was looking for an alternative career and they said, I wish I had a passion for something to pursue, but I don't. This is so hard. So what all of this comes down to is the word passion. Being misunderstood, because when, when we say follow your passion or find your passion, there's this idea people have that it's this thing outside of you. It's this thing that already exists in this entity that you can talk about, but really the idea of follow your passion to me is follow what you care about, follow what activates you, follow what you are curious about. People experience passion differently as well. Not everyone experiences it like this high energy hype girl. I love this. I'm so lit up. Like not everyone experiences it like that. I do. I definitely do. But not everyone is like high energy hype girl like me. Sometimes passion is this like quiet contentment. It's a satisfaction. And it can start as like a weird special interest that you just kind of go down rabbit holes about and you're like, Oh, I actually really enjoy this. And another thing that can happen is when we're really burnt out and exhausted and shell of a person depleted, like a lot of us can get in medicine. It's really difficult to access anything we care about because we're kind of broken in that sense, and that's a red flag, right? Like we need to have things that we care about. And what I know to be true is that when we give ourselves space to recover from burnout and come back to ourselves, when we connect back into, to ourselves and our core. There is interest there. There is activation. There is curiosity. There is something that we care about. We all have something like that. If we're not experiencing it right now, it's because we're disconnected from ourselves. There's some other arguments. I think Cal Newport, I don't remember even who said this, but they said. Mantras like, find your passion, carry hidden implications. They imply that once an interest resonates, pursuing it will be easy. What? I don't understand why that would be an implication. Why is it implied that following your passion is easy? That's absolutely not implied. The word passion comes from the root of the Latin word that means suffering. It's like passio. It's like suffer. Of course, it's not easy to follow your passion. That's just like a ridiculous, I don't know who's thinking that. I know you guys aren't thinking that, um, but that's just like an odd, like cultivating mastery of the thing that we're passionate about is so difficult. There should be no implication that following it is easy. If anyone is thinking that, no, it's absolutely not true. Another quote from this article from Cal Newport, the idea that passions are found fully formed implies that the number of interests a person has is limited, what? Okay. So just because you have a passion, there's nothing that needs to be fully formed about it. That doesn't need to be part of the definition of passion. Passion doesn't need to be fully formed, and it's not something that's found outside of you. It's inside of you. And it can be formed in any capacity. It can be baby formed. It can be adult formed. It can be at any level of formed. It's not limited. And it can shift and change, right? Like, none of those things about passion are accurate. So I think what's happening is people are taking the word passion and putting a bunch of weird ideas to it that then make you say, don't follow your passion. But the reason I find this to be a problem is because one, if you hear don't follow your passion, for the most part, what people take from that is you need to settle. You need to settle for something you medium care about. That's not what they're saying. That's not what like Cal Newport and Ali Abdul, they're not saying that. But I think that's how the don't follow your passion advice can be misconstrued. And that can be harmful. What they're hearing is it's not realistic to actually be what you care about. So you should probably settle for something you medium care about or something that like, I don't know, pays the bills. So one of the dangers of saying, don't follow your passion is then people take that and they turn it into, I'll have to settle for something that I don't care about. The other problem is if you're not following your passion, what are you following? Probably something external. Because when I think of passion, I think of it as like this internal drive, this internal like rage to master. And when you're not following your inner guide, like the feelings you have inside of you that kind of point you towards, I care about this. This is something that matters to me. If you're not following that, Then you're looking externally. You're looking at what other people tell you, you can do, you're looking at the options given to you by certain websites, you're asking anyone else for advice on like what you should do, you're saying, well, I have this skill set and what can match this skill set? What is the job that pays that can match this skill set that I already have? And you're not actually connecting internally to what you want. And when you're not following that. Like that's when we get lost and confused and that's when we get off track. You need this inner drive to master something. Otherwise you're basing your whole career on external validation and you're going to hit a point where you don't care. There's another thing that they're saying, what's more important is that you develop something that you're really good at and then turn that into a career and when you're good at something that translates into liking it and Sure, I think that can happen But I know for sure That it's not always true and then that can really trap people because I have spoken firsthand with like a plastic surgeon who was being revered for like a prodigy because of how much talent she had and she was so good and everyone kept telling her like how excellent she was and she was really good but she didn't want to keep doing that. That wasn't something that she cared about anymore. And she was miserable. In fact, it's not even just that she didn't care about it. She felt really miserable in that setting and using her talents in that way. But she felt trapped because everyone told her you're so good at this. You can't leave because you're so good. So sure skills are important, but you need to have this inner drive in this interest and that's what I call passion. And I know. That following your passion can be misunderstood in a way that is detrimental, like I talked about in that one physician Facebook group where they said, I wish I had a passion for something to pursue, but I don't. What I actually said to them in the Facebook group said the idea of a passion can feel really daunting or out of reach, especially when you're exhausted and uninspired. So let go of that word for now. The best thing to do from a place of exhaustion isn't to ask what lights me up or what's my passion, but instead what feels like relief and start moving towards that. But what you're doing is you're looking inside. You're going from a place within you, you're moving towards relief, but once you recover from burnout, there is going to be something that activates you. And that's important to follow. Another one of their arguments, was famous people like Steve Jobs would give advice to like follow your passion and do what you love when they're like at the height of their career and like in Steve Jobs commencement speech, he's like, do what you love, but then Cal's argument was, but he didn't follow his own advice. Steve jobs liked Buddhism initially, and he didn't follow that. He just kind of stumbled into his career. But when I look back at his timeline in his history, I actually find lots of evidence of that being their exact path, there's actually interviews where Steve Jobs has shared stories about being captivated by computers at 12 years old. And he was going to HP's headquarters and like their research lab and spending hours there writing programs for their computers. So he did have this special interest for computers at the age of 12, just because he also liked Buddhism and didn't make that into a career doesn't mean that he didn't follow his passion to get him to where he is. So while there's a lot of thoughts and arguments and ideas around the concept of passion, I really believe at the end of the day, the concept of passion is so misunderstood. But I think if we're not following our passion, we're following someone else's script, we're following external validation, we're following what we think we should be doing. And I think of passion ultimately as just like, what do you care about? What matters to you? What lights you up? What activates you? And if that's not accessible to you right now, because you're burned out, then what feels like relief move towards that. But we have to stay in tuned to what we care about. And we have to move from that place. Otherwise we're going to end up in a career that's completely inauthentic. So. My controversial advice is follow the fuck out of your passions and don't follow anything else if you want support identifying your passions so that you can follow them, that is exactly what we do together in my world. Head to coachtellsmd. com to see how we can work together.